The first biography of Grossman, who, though little known in the West, is regarded as one of the great Russian novelists of this century. The Garrards (coauthors, Inside the Soviet Writer's Union, 1990), basing themselves largely on archival and unpublished sources that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union, approach their subject through the prism of one of the most traumatic experiences of Grossman's life: the death of his mother during the mass execution of some 30,000 Jews at Berdichev in 1941. The impact of her death on Grossman was the more devastating because he had failed to use his influence to ensure that she left Berdichev before the Nazi occupation. This event, together with his experiences during WW II, when he was the most famous Soviet war correspondent and was present at the liberation of the notorious Treblinka concentration camp, make him, the Garrards note, the person who first documented the Holocaust, publishing accounts as early as 1943. It also set him on a collision course with Stalin, who wanted no mention of the role played by Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the Holocaust, and who was himself moving into the anti-Semitic phase characterized by the ``Doctor's Plot.'' Only Stalin's death, the Garrards believe, saved Grossman's life. Even after Stalin's death the writer continued to have difficulty in getting his work published, and his greatest novel, Life and Fate, which has been compared to War and Peace, was not published in Russia until 1988, nearly 25 years after Grossman's death. A little extravagant in its judgments—the Garrards believe that Grossman ``offered a more substantial challenge to Marxism- Leninism than anything Solzhenitsyn published''—but a valuable introduction to an important and hitherto neglected figure. (illustrations, maps)
Pub Date: March 6, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82295-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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